The Chad Frye - Illustration GuyIf you are just joining us, please know that this is one page of a 10 page series being posted here on the ol’ blog. Please CLICK HERE to start back on the first page to see a full explanation of what this art is all about. Thanks!
Clearly, this ServiceMan is able to fix a lot of different types of machines. It looks like if he had to, he was equipped to fix a cold, sick candy-spewing robot that gets milked in the kitchen.
If you are just joining us, please know that this is one page of a 10 page series being posted here on the ol’ blog. Please CLICK HERE to start back on the first page to see a full explanation of what this art is all about. Thanks!
The book itself was in a small square format. It was fun playing around with organic shapes in the background when I could!
Back in 2014, I was contacted by ServiceMax, a company in the San Francisco bay area, to create some art for a unique advertising project. ServiceMax is a tech company, and they wanted to showcase an iPad app they created that can help mobile servicemen with other companies to do their jobs better. The idea was to have a sales brochure disguised as a children’s book that ServiceMax intended to distribute at a convention for their industry.
Time was of the essence with this project. I had two weeks to go from pencil concepts to final art, and this all was while I was gainfully employed from 9-6 at an animation studio! Yikes! Under the guidance of art director Percy Chow, I proceeded to tackle the art with the idea of doing it in a throwback style similar to mid-century illustrators H.A. Rey and Syd Hoff. You know – that simplified drawing style and limited color palette thing that looks easy, but really takes a lot of work!
The challenge was fun. With those limitations for that art style, it forces you to be creative in a way you don’t normally think of when left to your own unlimited devices. So I tackled the art with simplicity, but thinking of flow and design since I could only use black, the white of the paper, and the colors from ServiceMax’s logo (light blue, dark blue, & orange).
Since the only way you would ever have been able to see this art before was to have been handed one of the books at that tech convention back in 2014, this remains the rarest book I have ever done! With ServiceMax’s permission, I am happy to share the art with you here on the ol’ blog.
For the next 10 business days (we’ll take the weekends off), I will be posting one page each day for your perusal. The story is about Max, the iPad with ServiceMax’s software on it, and how he helps out ServiceMan with his job of driving around repairing various mechanical devices.
Today, I present to you the front cover:
The other day I was reading an article saying that some ocean archaeologists found what they believe to be the anchor from Blackbeard’s actual ship off the coast of North Carolina! I got all excited about it, and for days I was thinking about pirates! I even went so far as to sketch this one on a letter I was writing to a friend. (Yes, some of us still write real letters – it’s better than e-mail to give friends real sketches.) Then I went back and re-read the article, and found that it had been posted in 2011. So much for current events.
Well, I suppose that since the anchor was found in the ocean, that qualifies it for being a current event no matter how you look at it. (Can I have a rimshot?)
Welcome back to work after the long holiday weekend! You know that’s where you are as you read this. You were too busy relaxing and having fun over the Memorial Day holiday to bother keeping up with Facebook and other such time wasters on the net. We all know that’s what the first hour or two back at work is for anyway!
While others may be dragging in grumpy about leaving behind their weekend experiences to sit under the lulling pulsating hum of fluorescent lights and in the warm gentle glow of a computer screen with the hint of weak coffee in the air, take this opportunity to be the optimistic happy cat in the bunch.
As for me, I’m at the beach today. My smile is genuine.
This year the National Cartoonists Society is having their annual Reuben Awards convention weekend in good ol’ Memphis, Tennessee. As part of the festivities, members were asked to create some Memphis-themed art that could be used for several purposes:
The choice was obvious – since Memphis is the home of Elvis (which is all I really knew it for, having never been to the city in my life), I chose to illustrate the Memphis Zoo with a slight nod to Elvis, of course. I present to you The King of the Beasts.
While this is not quite a velvet Elvis painting, it is a real painting nonetheless. I procrastinated a little in creating it, but ultimately decided it’s now or never. To ease your suspicious mind, I broke out my long-unused gouache paints, some of which needed a little reconstitution with the aid of some Kentucky rain. Basically the paints needed a little less conversation, a little more action. The only part created digitally are the words, so there is a nice painting there for one lucky bidder TONIGHT! Sales are final in benefit of the sick kids – bidders can’t return to sender.
Yes, that last paragraph was a little corny, but please don’t be cruel with your comments.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Sometimes when I sketch, I just start with a nose and see where it goes from there with no preconceived notion of what I am about to draw. Other times the sketch is informed by a curiosity I may have. Such is the case with today’s doodle. I saw pictures of some male lions, and I wondered what they might look like if they started losing their hair and decided to do a combover.
…and I mean that literally! Yes folks, unless this is some kind of an elaborate April Fool’s joke being played on me, the monsters that have lived in the apartment above me for the past three years, four months, five days and 18 hours have finally up and vanished into the misty night air from whence they came.
You may recall these folks. I have mentioned them several times here on my blog, along with the random comment on Facebook and Twitter. Here is a photo I secretly took of them after the first year of sleep deprived nights.
Here’s to all the foot stomping, toilet seat slamming, hammering after 10pm, hour and a half to two hour long showers, two flooding mishaps, music loud enough to understand the lyrics, listening to their movies while trying to watch mine, slumber parties, chalk drawings on my doorstep, bed jumping, Olympic gymnastics practice, track meets in the living room, door slamming, shot-put throwing, bowling, peasant whippings, chains scraping, and I’m pretty sure dragon feeding.
May the new tenants be kind and gentle souls sensitive to those around them.